Eminent Corporations: The Rise and Fall of the Great British Brands

How much do you know about the big-name brands we live by?

Virgin, BP, Land Rover, Barclays, Cadbury's, BBC and M&S.

In our times the PLCs have been seen as giants, the backbone of commerce and society. Yet seen through a historical perspective they are vulnerable creatures, flowering only briefly. In fact, on the Fortune 500 - a roll-call of power if ever there was one - there's just one company, General Electric, which was on the list half a century ago. The rest have gone: broken, bankrupt, merged, raided for their parts. More like mayflies than megacorps. And getting more fragile all the time.

The great corporations that now dominate our lives are treated by the law courts as if they were people.They have the same rights, but unlike us they have no emotions, morals or life histories.The only corporate biographies you find are celebratory, promotional portraits with the warts left out. So, we don't really know where most great brands came from or where they are going.

This book spills the beans by telling the real life stories of some of the biggest corporate names, and finds them as dramatic, flawed and revealing as any human biography.

Andrew Simms is Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and a board member of Greenpeace UK. He is the author of the hugely successful Tescopoly and Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?

David Boyle is a fellow of NEF and the author of a series of books about history, social change and the future, including Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, The Tyranny of Numbers and The Sum of Our Discontent. Funny Money: In search of alternative cash launched the time banks movement in the UK.